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21/07/2005 Rights & Wrongs

San Francisco’s Quality Daily?

Flicking through the daily papers in the coffee shop yesterday, I came across what has to be the most tasteless headline I’ve seen in a while. Thankfully it was in the “Datebook” section of the S.F. Chronicle, and not on the front page proper, but even so you have to ask yourself just what kind of numpties work on the paper?

TV’s next great series is set in Iraq. And it’s on FX. Change your regime.

For those who don’t know, FX is normally the place where old sci-fi programmes go to die.

Now we all know TV is important, that’s obvious. Other real-life events are important too – in their way. For example, events like wars in the real world make wonderful metaphors for the release of a new “unpolitical” TV drama. Every time you use the TV remote to change stations doesn’t it feel like you’ve just exercised your democratic rights, only better? Oh yes.

Sadly I’m not particularly surprised by this editorial gaffe. On an average day the San Francisco Chronicle is doltishly split into nine separate little papers.

  • News (national and international)
  • Sporting Green
  • Business
  • Bay Area (local news)
  • Datebook (events)
  • Home& Garden
  • Food
  • Wine
  • Classifieds

Each one is about eight pages long. Why can’t they just have two papers, one for news with international and national news at the front, business and local news in the middle, and sports on the back pages? What’s so wrong with lumping the lifestyle stuff all in together with a different emphasis each day of the week? Is wine really so important that is deserves its own little paper? By the same logic, shouldn’t there be a little “Beer” paper?

I asked a local about this once, and she thought it was a good thing. “It shows you where our priorities lie,” was her proud response. The Chronicle is one of the few things I dislike about San Francisco.

07/07/2005 Culture, Music

Accentuate the Positive

Big Chill soon! Many of the acts I want to see normally draw blanks with everyone, and not just Courtney. So, in preparation for the festivities, here’s my list of must-sees and reasons for seeing.

1) The Fatback Band
The only reason these rhythm and blues masters are on my radar is for their groovy tune “Bus Stop.” It’s not even mentioned on the Big Chill website, so I can only assume the tunes that are must be even better. They’ve done everything from r’n’b to soul to disco to hip-hop, and are guaranteed to be as polished as brand new bling. They’ve been sampled to death, too, so there’s a good chance we’ll all know bits of their set. My early favourite for most danceable grooves of the weekend.

2) Roisin Murphy
Also known as the voice of Moloko. She’s probably getting a lot more exposure back home than here, so apologies if everyone’s excited about seeing her. What’s even more exciting, for me at least, is that Matthew Herbert is producing her new stuff. The Matthew Herbert big band was my highlight of 2003’s Chill, and his Bodily Functions album is one of my favourite albums. She played Glasto, and the bit of her gig I saw online was great. As well as being pleasing to the ear, she’s easy on the eye. Mmm. Redheads.

3) Kate Rusby
Over the last couple of years I’ve started to really appreciate English folk music, and during that time I’ve consistently heard good things Kate Rusby, but somehow I’ve not heard any of her stuff. Everyone who tells me about her says how great she is live, and what a good voice she has. I hope she’s got a nice chill afternoon slot. Perferably just before the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. I’m really looking forward to hearing the recommendations justified.

4) A Certain Ratio
The punk-funk sound seems to be re-emerging with bands like !!!, and even Franz Ferdinand, but it was A Certain Ratio who first made it popular in the late seventies/early eighties. I heard their stuff on a reissue when visiting Courtney in Norwich in 2002, and it stuck in my head. Danceable and spiky, they should be worth watching. I just hope they’re not a washout like the under-rehearsed Durutti Column were last year.

5) Horace Andy
A legendary roots reggae singer, he’s best known to my generation for his work with Massive Attack. Can’t wait.

It’ll be interesting to see St. Etienne, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain will be good fun once more, and Nouvelle Vague promise to be entertaining. Their version of Love Will Tear Us Apart is great. Even better, whilst surfing today in preparation to blog, I came across Yat Kha’s cover of the same song. Yat Kha are a group of Tuvan throat singers. Yes, throat singers. I almost went to see them in Canterbury, and now I wish I had.

Love Will Tear Us Apart – Albert Kuvezin & Yat-Kha

Go one, have a listen. We all need something to smile about today.

21/06/2005 Rights & Wrongs

Legal Alien Homesick Blues

On the 30th August 2004 I had my green card interview. It was, in the words of the immigration officer, a slam dunk. The card would be with me in two weeks.

It is now almost ten months later and my green card has not arrived. I have a stamp in my passport which is, in effect, a temporary green card. It expires on August 30th 2005, at which point I will be in England. Without a green card I cannot re-enter the USA, except as a tourist.

We rang the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services disinformation line a few months ago and were advised to delay taking any action to find out where the card was. “Wait and see” was the tone of the advice. With six weeks left before we board a plane for the UK, waiting is no longer a sensible option.

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20/06/2005 Miscellaneous

As Happy as a Dog with…

…six legs?

It’s another beautiful day in northern California, and for the first time in a few weeks Courtney isn’t working on an English essay. Earlier I managed to wrest the laptop from her typing talons and have a browse around. The third thing I came across was this:

Puppy with a 50% bonus in the leg department, and a 100% weiner surplus.

A puppy with two extra legs and a second penis is drawing curious stares at a temple in Pandamaran town.

He certainly looks pretty happy.

Here’s the rest of the story.

07/06/2005 Picture of the Week

Yosemite Encore

Mountains reflected in the transitional marshlands of Yosemite Valley, 14th June 2005.

From last month’s trip to Yosemite, here’s the view from a boardwalk across the marshland of Yosemite Valley floor. The falls in the previous pictures feed into this contrasting loveliness.

02/06/2005 Food

Gourmet my Arse!

The word "gourmet" is over-used in the USA. Constant application to items such as burgers, jerky and cat food have stretched the word out, made it frayed and baggy, worn holes in the knees and rendered it useless for carrying meaning.

Today laughing chance brought me stumbling across a section of the salon.com website known as the Surreal Gourmet. A chap called Bob Blumer advocates recipes in which a familiar ingredient is cooked in an unfamiliar appliance and vice versa. Did you know you can poach salmon in a dishwasher?

At first I thought "how ingenious," but in the last few minutes it’s occured to me that it’s as "ingenious" as it is "gourmet". True ingenuity is not using a non-essential electrical appliance to amuse dinner party guests, it’s plastering a dead hedgehog in mud and roasting it in a bonfire, gypsy style. That, and making water flow uphill using a corkscrew tube.

01/06/2005 Music

Oscillate Artfully

Wow, has so much time already passed since I promised to write more blog posts? Time flies when you’re having visitors. In fact, I’ve over a month’s worth of thought backlog to transcribe and edit into legible form.

About a month ago, James and I were merrily meandering down Haight Street when we came upon what is probably the best record shop in the world. The experience of walking into Amoeba records for the first time is roughly similar to going downstairs in Blackwells in Oxford. You see the lines of shelves running away and converging on the distant horizon and your mind somersaults to think that there’s so much good stuff out there. There can’t be enough hours in a human life to listen to all the CDs in Amoeba, but if the staff would have let me sleep there I’d have been tempted to try.

Cover of Stereolab's

I was good; I limited myself to one purchase – and what a purchase! I shelled out eighteen clams for a little cardboard box titled Oscillons from the Anti-Sun. Said box contains three CDs of tracks from Stereolab’s elusive EPs, a DVD of promo videos and live performances, and little CD sleeve sized stickers of their EP covers. All excellent, but most importantly it has the song Fluorescences, which I heard once in 1996 on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 1 graveyard slot and have wanted ever since. It’s just as good as I remember.

A lot of the early Stereolab stuff I haven’t heard before. Listening to Jenny Ondioline I realised that, odd as it may sound, there are aesthetic similarities between Stereolab and Wilco, especially when you compare the groop’s early stuff to material from Wilco’s latest, A Ghost is Born. There are moments where both bands will build up a tapestry of noise, a repetitive riff, a synthy drone and mechanical percussion, and then they’ll break through this with a pretty melody sung by a modest voice.

And what’s an oscillon? It’s a recent (1996) discovery in the field of physics. Here’s a video of an oscillon in action. Essentially they are surprisingly constant patterns formed by vibrating particles, of great significance to those who study chaos theory.

And who are Stereolab? They’re an oddly retro-futuristic band who often stuff a gamut of musical styles into three-part pop songs. Half of the band are from London, the other half from Paris, and I’m a sucker for their singer, Laetitia Sadier. Imagine Juliette Binoche playing a cooly detatched pop singer and you’re almost there.

15/05/2005 Miscellaneous

More Soon

Although the blog suggests otherwise, I’ve not gone belly-up or been disappeared by Homeland Security. Visits from first James and then Mum and Dave-Dad (as opposed to Duncan-Dad) have eaten up all my time and quite a bit of Courtney’s.

Speaking of Courtney, she’s just walked in the door with two big bottles of my favourite beer (St. Peter’s English Ale, since you ask) to quell the pain of Norwich’s embarrassing 6-0 exit from the Permiership. My big green and yellow bruise is subsiding already.

25/04/2005 Housekeeping

Play Online Poker!

The Magic Rubber Gloves of Sterilization

Today has been comment spam day. I just had to delete about fifty gibberish comments, all linking to an online poker website. Consequently I’ve installed a spam filter. Let me know if your legitimate comments don’t make it past my new security measures.

Coming soon: metal detectors, shoe searches, magic puffer machines which blow your shirt up in search of boobies and, allegedly, traces of explosive dust, and my personal favourite, cavity searches!

19/04/2005 Culture, Music

Chilled Out

Grrrboooaaaaggghhhh! The Big Chill website is down. We’ve been waiting for it to be back up so we can buy our tickets for about a week. We’ve given up. I’m calling their phone booking line tomorrow morning. Whoop-de-whoop for days off.

Anybody know any more than me about this badness? I hope it doesn’t mean the website collapsed under the weight of demand for tickets, although I doubt that would be the case. It’s not as if it’s as manic as Glastonbury.

18/04/2005 Email of the Week, Weekly Goodness

Email of the Week 18th-24th April

From Jon:

Fearn and me found a live rat in the bin outside the other day and had to kill it. First I tried hitting it with a pole and then tried smoking it out. Nothing worked so Fearn poured boiling water over it. He’s changed now, has a distant look in his eyes like solider back from Nam.

You can’t let a rat go.

This has a certain essential beauty, I feel. Transcendent almost. Quivering, naked, raw.

17/04/2005 Davis

The Day of the Cucumber Sandwich (part two)

The lovely Miranda
Picnic Day turned out to be more fun than I thought. Having witnessed a pretty half-arsed St. Patrick’s Day parade in Rochester last year, I’ve been apprehensive about parades. As I’ve discovered from watching student films, there’s little entertainment to be had from watching people walking.

Yesterday I discovered I may have been too harsh in that judgement.

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15/04/2005 Davis

The Day of the Cucumber Sandwich (Part One)

Tomorrow I’m being hauled into work – missing the televised coverage of Crystal Palace vs Norwich – to help Mishka’s deal with the craziness of Picnic Day. Apparently, everyone who has ever lived in Davis returns to the town for the day to watch a parade and a dachshund steeplechase.

I’m charging the camera batteries as I type.

13/04/2005 Miscellaneous

Facetiousness: A Poll

In future, should I mark facetious blog posts out with a little [facetious] in the title?

To clear up any misunderstanding that may have occurred after the last post, me and the missus are as perfectly happy as normal, or bumbling along in our own little way, whichever you’d rather imagine.

Must stop now and take my beating. I’ll blog more when I can sit down at the computer again.

11/04/2005 Culture, Rights & Wrongs

Media Career? Think Different

Considering the glut of qualified graduates queuing up for a job in the media, is it any wonder people are getting used? Reading this makes me think that my less conventional approach to breaking into the film and TV industry may actually be the better bet.

‘Exploitation is more widespread than ever’ Media Guardian, 11th April, 2005

For those of you who are unsure exactly what my method is, here’s the lowdown:

  1. Move as far away from the place you want to work as possible. The other side of the world is a good starting point. If you want a job in London, try moving to the west coast of America.
  2. Get a job in an industry as far removed from the media as possible. Try food service, in particular, coffee shops. Girls flock to coffee shops.
  3. Take up writing. Doesn’t matter if you’re any good at it or not. Girls always swoon when they hear the line "I’m a writer," delivered with an English accent; especially stupid ones with lots of money. Target them mercilessly.
  4. Move in with rich, stupid girl. Live off her like a parasite. Get drunk as often as possible and claim you’re "networking."
  5. When your rich, stupid girlfriend finally discovers you’re a fraud, break down and cry shamelessly in front of her. Tell her you love her, but you have writer’s block and/or homesickness. This should buy you a couple of weeks to find a second stupid rich girl. Make sure the first one doesn’t dump your stuff out in the street in the meantime.

That’s my method so far. Due to lack of data, I cannot promise it will deliver the desired results, but I feel my big break is just around the corner. It’s a lot more fun than working eighty hours a week for a pittance in London, and I appear to have come just as far by doing so. Here’s to being a Deadbeattm!

11/04/2005 Email of the Week, Weekly Goodness

Email of the Week 11th-17th April

This week, Kelvin:

Oh, last night at about two in the morning, there was a bizarre film about a man without a head, who was worried that his lack of bonce would prove to be a hindrance in his love life, so saved up money to buy a noggin, only to discover, of course, that the love of his life cares not a jot whether he has a head or not, and in fact loves him for who he is.

The first scene I caught as I channel-hopped had the headless one dancing about his poor attic apartment in a tuxedo, Fred Astaire style. I knew immediately that it was French.

Does anyone know what this movie is called and where I can find it?